Your own cites don’t even go that far. From the Gladwell piece:
From the Muller paper provided by Czarcasm:
The criticism being leveled towards criminal profiling isn’t that it has never, ever helped solve a single case ever, it’s that there isn’t enough data that it has done so in a statistically significant number of cases so as to prove itself truly useful. If a detective throws a dart at a corkboard covered with photographs of suspects, investigates the suspect that the dart hits who subsequently turns out to be the killer, the dart technique was successful in that one instance. The criticism isn’t that it never works, it’s that limited or anecdotal success doesn’t prove anything - if the next 999 times the dart technique is tried it doesn’t work, the one time it did work can be judged an outlier and the technique can be regarded as not useful on the whole.
So when your cite supports your position we should take it as truth, but when it doesn’t we should disregard it? Confirmation bias indeed. :dubious:
Okay, here’s a specific, anecdotal, proves-nothing-standing-alone example of one of the 2.7% British cases where profiling was used successfully: John Duffy.
Like I said, confirmation bias. What about the all the other times when the profiles are wrong? Just because people sometimes guess right doesn’t mean that guessing is a useful investigative technique.
:smack: Did you already forget what I said about the dartboard? The entire point is that profiling has been successful, even if that limited success doesn’t statistically prove it’s usefulness! You wanted just one example of any time it has ever successfully been used to solve a crime, and now you have one. It is in no way fatal to your position that profiling overall is not useful. It does not hurt your argument in any way if you acknowledge that you have been given exactly what you asked for.
Without knowing more about the case – and that story doesn’t tell any more – we don’t know how the Professor drew up the profile. You assume that he got nothing to start, but he may have been fed copious data that anyone else could have used to draw the same conclusions. It’s similar to a trick used by mentalists, to make you think the conclusions came from thin air instead of solid data.
And you don’t know how many times the Professor drew up other profiles that turned out to be wrong. This is just selective data mining.
Please see the post directly above yours. I am in no way intending to offer a single example where profiling appeared to work as a defense of the practice as a whole. I am merely pointing out that none of the cites offered state that it has never, ever worked even by accident, just that there’s no data that it works often enough to be considered useful overall.
I think we might have a definitional difference to “worked.” Just because someone created a description of a criminal and that criminal was caught doesn’t mean that criminal profiling “works.” You haven’t provided any data that shows it works. You are just assuming that a coincidence is something more.
If I am sick, take a pill, then get better, did the pill cause it? By your logic, it worked. Should everyone take that pill when they are sick, based on that one example?
You haven’t shown that. All you have is one possible coincidence in a sea of non-coincidences.
You’re missing my point entirely. I am not claiming in the slightest that the profile here wasn’t a lucky guess, or a coincidence, or anything better than a dart thrown at a dartboard, which is why I chose that particular analogy. There’s no way of proving that from a single anecdote. I am merely pointing out that the assertion that it has never led to a single arrest isn’t exactly true - even its harshest critics admit that it has helped lead to arrests of guilty subjects, just not often enough to statistically matter or prove it to be a useful technique. The request was made for a single case where it appeared to work, so I provided one. If the argument is now that a single case proves nothing, sure, I already admitted that.
A single case proves nothing, not even that it “works.” All you’ve shown is…nothing.
Weasel words: “Helped lead to arrests…” Too subjective, and too tainted by opinion. How much help? How did it help? By stating the obvious? Is that helping?
You got nothing here. Criminal profiling may not be a textbook case of cold reading, but it’s not a heck of a lot more than that.
Yes, appeared to work. Since it’s just an anecdote, that’s all anyone can say about it, but an anecdote was all that was asked for. Going back to your pill analogy, if somebody said “Nobody’s ever taken that pill and gotten better! Tell me one time that that’s ever happened!”, you could reasonably point out “well, that’s not entirely true…to be fair, I took it once and subsequently got better, not that that one instance proves anything.” You’d probably be mystifyed if people kept insisting “that one instance doesn’t prove anything!” despite your lack of protestaions to the contrary.
I already admitted that, several times. We can’t debate if you agree with me.
That’s not my position. I’m paraphrasing Gladwell and Muller, both critcs of profiling.
